I've finally found the right development environment for myself for writing and debugging Web Applications that use JavaScript to implement client-side interaction. It turns out that it wasn't just me who found the thought of programming inside the Web browser a painful experience --- pleasant though the final end-user interaction that those results deliver might be for the final user. I discovered MozRepl --- a read-eval-print loop for Firefox. MozRepl is a Firefox extension that allows you to open a connection to a running Firefox session and gain access to a JavaScript interpreter context that can access all aspects of the Firefox runtime.
This is quite neat, I can now use the power of Emacs to write
and debug end-user JavaScript applications.
But wait, there is more. So in general, as someone who doesn't
need to suffer from the hit on cycles and memory that running an X
environment involves,
I usually dont start GDM --- the graphical desktop
--- on my Linux box. Believe me, running just at the console,
especially with the LCD turned off makes my laptop run a lot
longer.
So challenge: How do you take the fox's head off Firefox?
How do you run a headless Firefox?
Turns out that the original X Windows developers didn't always
have access to all the displays that they were developing X
applications for --- so they created XVFB --- the X
Virtual Frame Buffer server.
Like all good things in the Open Source world, XVFB continues to
survive --- even though today, X developers hardly if ever resort
to XVFB.
But in the fine UNIX tradition of
Get out of my way or I'll turn you into a shell
script
XVFB also turns out to be just what I needed in order to run
FireFox as a headless application.
So in summary: I'm typing this blog on the shuttle bus riding home, with the monitor turned off, and Firefox running headless as I debug some of the code I've been writing. If you want to put the fox's head in a box yourself, here is a pointer to FireBox -- share and enjoy!
